State-of-the-art video-coding methods and standards, for example H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (H.264/AVC), may provide higher coding efficiency than older methods and standards at the expense of higher complexity. Increasing quality requirements and resolution requirements on video coding methods and standards may also increase their complexity. Decoders that support parallel decoding may improve decoding speeds and reduce memory requirements. Additionally, advances in multi-core processors may make encoders and decoders that support parallel decoding desirable.
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC [Joint Video Team of ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG, “H.264: Advanced video coding for generic audiovisual services,” ITU-T Rec. H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10 (MPEG4—Part 10), November 2007], which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, is a video codec specification that uses macroblock prediction followed by residual coding to reduce temporal and spatial redundancy in a video sequence for compression efficiency.